Thursday, February 2nd 2012
Seagate GoFlex Thunderbolt Adapter Starts Shipping
Seagate started shipping its GoFlex Thunderbolt Adapter accessory. The gadget lets you connect a SATA drive (HDD or SSD) to a host machine over 10 Gbps Thunderbolt interface, completely eliminating any bottleneck (USB 3.0 bottlenecks SATA 6 Gb/s). It works by simply sliding and locking in a SATA device to its industry-standard SATA power+data interface, and plugging the adapter to the host using a Thunderbolt cable. The Seagate GoFlex Thunderbolt Adapter is priced at US $99.99.
12 Comments on Seagate GoFlex Thunderbolt Adapter Starts Shipping
For that money, you can buy a 1TB hard drive and a case/dock combo that gives you full Sata speed when docked and eSata or USB3 on the go.
Anyways, if you're using eSata drives already, it's very likely that you don't have thunderbolt on your PC.
But i have 4x 1tb goflex drives that I swap a FW800 adaptor out with sometimes. Thunderbolt addition just makes me even more glad I went with goflex devices. Bravo seagate. It's really nice to see a "form factor" made by someone isn't just abandoned a year after its introduction.
Love the drives, love the continued support. It's not a docking station. It's an attachment that goes on the end of the small goflex HDD.
Note the extra bumps on either edge of the top and bottom of the SATA connector. If you shave those off, it will work with any SATA drive. Without removing them, any SATA HDD with a plastic shroud around the actual connectors (most drive that I've seen) will not fit. Let's hope Seagate hasn't gone to using metal or something not as easily removed as the plastic they've used in the past.
Also, this specific adapter is meant for their portable GoFlex 2.5" drives.
Laptop-> HDD1-> HDD2-> HDD3-> Random peripheral-> Monitor
-> Power
Super simplified docking station. :toast:
Also, Macbook pro's won't have USB 3 until ivy bridge launches(Since its going from a third party chipset to integrated), most likely, so its a faster than usb 2.0 option for mac users. USB 2 is worthless. :banghead: